The human eye is a complex organ, home to photoreceptor cones and rods that interpret our feild of view into the images that you're currently reading. The eye is one of our most important and hardest working senses - though under the right circumstancces it is easy to fool.

Eighteenth and ninteenth century doctors and scientists knew this and expiramented with the vulnerability of the eye to manipulate our vision. It could be something as simple as an optical illusion to make an image appear 3D or something complex like an immersive panoramic display.
With the advent of photography in the 19th century, the imagination of the generation was expanded into the future. Taking photographs and what was known about the human eye all it took was a few basic ingredients that invented an early form of virtual "reality." With two offset photographs and a pair of binoculers the viewer could be transported to somwhere halfway across the world.

So before you tout your Oculus Rift as the cornerstone of VR technology, we've got to take a trip back in time to its predecessors. What early VR devices lacked in technology, they made up for with acute understanding of human vision, what it takes to bend it, and how to create a different reality, if only for a moment.